Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting that the member for Robertson only had five minutes of debate. She is clearly suffering from lack of information. I have got a little fairy story of my own. Once upon a time there was a planet called Earth and everyone was living happily on this planet. But all of a sudden the citizens became concerned because the seas were going to rise, the temperature was going to increase, the crops were going to die, the cities were going to be inundated. But the Gillard government imposed a carbon tax, the earth cooled down, the sea levels calmed and we all lived happily ever after. The end. That was a short precis of the member for Robertson's speech!

This MPI is 'The urgent need ahead of 1 July 2012 for all Australians to be informed accurately of the impact of the carbon price and of the assistance being delivered in relation thereto'. We are seeing plenty of information being delivered to the public, but very little of it, if any, is about the carbon tax. The advertisements we have been seeing on the television and in the papers and hearing on the radio do not mention the carbon tax. It is something you do not mention. But, as a diligent member of parliament, I have been giving my constituents a bit of advice, seeing as the government will not. I am saying: 'This is not a gift from the government. This is not largesse. Please do not squander this payment, because you will need it, because your costs are going to go up.'

The member for Robertson said that her accountant could not tell her constituent how she was going to pay the carbon tax. I can tell her how she is going to pay the carbon tax. She is going to pay it through her power bill. She is going to pay it through her food bill. When she goes shopping, she is going to pay her share of keeping the air-conditioner going. When she pays her shire rates, she is going to pay her share for the bitumen that makes our roads. When her grandkids go to the pool, she will be paying her share for the extra energy it costs to keep the pool clean and the water circulating. When she goes walking at night-time, she will be paying her share for the streetlights that keep the place safe. How can the member for Robertson say she does not know how her constituent is going to pay the carbon tax? Everyone knows how they are going to pay it. The only people in this debate that seem to be clueless are the government.

I was at the tip last Sunday. It is a little tragic that, when you become a member of parliament, one of the great pleasures in life is going to the tip on Sunday. But tragically it is. I was speaking to a good friend of mine called Grant. Grant works in the local council, and he said, 'Hey, come over here; I want to talk to you.' He said, 'This carbon tax—they're telling us that all the big polluters are going to pay. That's what they're telling us, aren’t they?' I said, 'Yeah, Grant; that's what they're telling you.' He said, 'But that's not true, is it?' I will not say exactly what he said. Grant had worked it out. He said, 'We're going to be paying, aren't we?' Grant is a single bloke. Grant does not earn a lot of money. There is no compensation for Grant. Grant did not get a schoolkids bonus and he did not get a pension bonus. But he still has to pay for his electricity. In the little council that he works at, a council with fewer than 10,000 people, the increase from the carbon tax will be $365,000. Grant has worked it out, but the members over there cannot.

It is interesting that the members on this side of the House generally represent some of the electorates that have low levels of income. The members on that side of the House, with green leanings, tend to represent electorates that have people with high income. This inner city urban elite that are pushing, through the Greens, for a carbon tax are expecting the constituents of those of us on this side to pay it. This is not just me speaking; it is also Professor Garnaut, the great champion of climate change reform, the one that did the white paper for the government. Professor Garnaut said that regional Australia will face an economic downturn of 20 per cent and the cities will face a downturn of eight per cent. When you want to bring a tax into this House under which my constituents pay the same as everyone else, maybe we will start to talk about it, but you are expecting regional Australia to carry the can for this tax—and no-one is saying that that is not the truth; even Professor Garnaut has predicted it.

The member for Reid talked about how many cents for groceries. That is a bit of an academic argument if you happen to be a cement worker from Kandos. Kandos was in the seat of Parkes; it is now in the seat of Hunter—and I wonder what that change of boundaries in 2010 has done for them. In Kandos, there were 106 workers at the cement plant—four or five generations had been working at the same plant—and that plant is now gone, closed down. The members on the government side are saying, 'It's not the carbon tax; it's the dollar and everything else.' Ask Cement Australia, who have been knocking my door down since 2007. They will tell you it was the carbon tax. If you go to Kandos and ask those retrenched workers what caused this, they will tell you it was the carbon tax. The great irony of this is that, not far from Kandos, on the other side of Mudgee, they are building great big wind farms—wind turbines 170 metres high with blades 60 metres across. They are mostly made out of steel coming from China, which does not have a carbon tax. Underneath those wind turbines there are quite a few hundred tonnes of concrete to keep them up—they are big heavy things. That concrete has not been made from cement from Kandos. That cement now is coming on a boat from Asia into Sydney Harbour, where it is unloaded as clinker, ground up and sent out over the mountains to build these wind farms. What on earth have we come to?

This is a grand gesture. That side have stopped talking about saving the climate. They are talking about compensation and micro-economics, but they have actually stopped talking about saving the environment. If this is not going to change the environment, why the heck are we doing it? We talk about agriculture, and they say, 'Oh no; agriculture's been exempted.' The member for New England, who sits up here and whinges and whines and carries on all day in our ears, supporting the government, says, 'We've got the Carbon Farming Initiative.' Anyone that knows anything about agriculture knows that zero-till farming, increasing the amount of carbon in the soil, which is basically organic material, has been going on for years. Indeed, my brothers and I were undertaking trials with the New South Wales department of agriculture in the late seventies, with Roundup when it was first invented. This is not a new thing. Graziers have been changing the way they manage the grazing of their pastures to keep a higher level of organic material. But this is being sold as some sort of a windfall for farmers. Any money that is to be made out of carbon farming cannot possibly compensate for the increase in the costs of fuel, fertiliser, electricity and, for dairy farmers, refrigeration. There is no way that that can actually balance out. The interest of this is that the incentive—the incentive to use less energy, the incentive to sequester the carbon—has always been there, without the tax. There are the productivity gains, the extra production and the extra use of water. Australian farmers are growing more kilograms of grain, fibre and meat per litre of water and per unit of electricity now than they ever have. They are far more efficient now than they have ever been. They are the most efficient farmers in the world. They did not need a tax. They did not need the government to come with its Carbon Farming Initiative to show them the new way. People come from all over the world to see the farmers of my electorate, to see how things are done. They did not need a tax to do that. Indeed, the shadow minister at the table, the member for Flinders, has been and seen what I am talking about.

As to the idea that we are going to tax these farmers to make them more profitable by some sort of a payoff, look at the carbon trading on the Chicago Board of Trade that was brought in by Al Gore. That landscape-style trading has ceased to exist because the value of those carbon credits got so low that they stopped trading. So this idea that agriculture is somehow going to benefit from the carbon tax is an absolute nonsense.

In my electorate, a lot of people are suffering. They are not getting any sort of compensation. The self-funded retirees, the small businesses, the low-income earners, the people who do not have families, the farmers—all those sorts of people are paying the price for this carbon tax. On the last sitting day before this tax comes in, it is with a heavy heart that I stand here and believe that I am actually saying these things. The Australian people have had their pockets filled up with lead. They have a ball and chain around their ankles. They have been told to go out and compete with the rest of the world while they are dragging this heavy burden, which is nothing but a grand gesture, which is this carbon tax. (Time expired)

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